INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND CHARACTER

Solfa names, many teachers of music urge strongly their
importance. The peculiarity, from a psychological point
of view, about a Solfa name is that it invests a single note
with a background of relationships. If anyone sings to
me a single note to the syllable " ah," I hear just a single
note; or if I fit it into any set of relationships, it is unlikely
to be the same set as that intended by the singer* But if
he sings a Solfa name to the note, say lah, then its place
in a musical scale is fixed, and it has, as sung, certain
emotional tendencies which are the result of that position.
The name produces in me an attitude or set intended by the
singer. In part this attitude is a readiness to go on to other
notes, as to go on to doh from te. For my own part, too,
I find that I can often remember a new and still rather
unfamiliar melody better by its Solfa names than by any
unnamed tone-sequence, as, e.g., remembering that " Rufty
Tufty ** begins Doh—doh ray me. This one finds in many
other spheres of memory also. If one is asked to gaze at
a building or other object and then presently, turning one's
back, to describe it (as in one lesson of the Army " Eyesight
training ") one finds it a great assistance—or at least I do
—to say to oneself such points as—" the windows have blue
curtains, there are two rain-barrels/' etc. In part this is
because attention is thereby directed to these details:
in part it is, I think, because of the facility of recall of words
even in a subject with a good visual memory.

The advantage, which has been emphasized in this chapter,
arising from the way in which words drop off any particular
attributes (such as blackness in a cat) and thereby are enabled
to stand as signs for concepts (as cat or charity, or atthvugh)
is in contradiction to what was said in Chapter X on seeing
pictures in words. The contradiction is, however, only
superficial. The recommendation there made, to go back
to the original pictures in the words, is very much needed,
even though words owe their conceptualizing power to the
trick of dropping such pictures. In most cases, speakers

122